Cuadernos de Ilustración y Romanticismo (Dec 2019)

Luces y sombras en la Europa de la Ilustración: la burla en las cartas entre José Nicolás de Azara y Giambattista Bodoni

  • Noelia López Souto

DOI
https://doi.org/10.25267/Cuad_Ilus_romant.2019.i25.18
Journal volume & issue
no. 25
pp. 309 – 337

Abstract

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This work raises a new approach to the mordant style of José Nicolás de Azara practiced in the private correspondence with his typographer friend Giambattista Bodoni, which is developed in an Italian sociocultural context. Despite the treatment of high themes of mutual professional interest and Azara’s polite expressive moderation in these missives, the mockery is shown in them as an intrinsic mechanism of his writing and it emerges to expose his critical vision towards the reality of that time. He observes some facts and characters with a distorting mirror in order to denounce their defects, which mostly refer to a lack of culture or a political-personal rivalry. Thus, these cases of mockery portray Azara as a demanding intellectual dedicated to diplomacy. They serve also to depict a living picture of the European society of the moment, irregular in its Lights.

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